DOES THE HDK SUSPENSION K-MEMBER HANDLE BETTER THAN A T-BAR SUSPENSION?

HPP said
Fair enough. I forget Sway Away is still making torsion bars. At $400-500 a pair, they are a bit spendy to have a whole mess of them to swap around, but even a few pairs of t-bars are less expensive than a whole new system. I'd also guess that most of us aren't racing these cars in a manner that necessitates those types of change over, t-bar or coil over.

I did point out the caster/camber relationship isn't a show stopper, but it does require some effort or parts to overcome.

I certainly wouldn't go to a coil over suspension as my first choice for losing weight. There are plenty of other ways that provide a much greater bang for the buck by comparison.

I'm still a fan of the stock set up and am working on a few tricks to push it further out on the envelope. The are ways to alter the geometry for improvements, but they aren't always easy and it will always have the lower control arm pivot/torsion bar interference issue that will require adjustments to improve bump steer curves.

Yeah I don't think most people, even those being fairly aggressive in their racing participation, would really need more than a couple sets of torsion bars. With AutoX it would be down to tire compounds, so really I think you'd only need 1 set of bars unless you were doing different classes that had dramatically different tire compound rules. And if you were doing road racing it would depend on your tracks. But really, even the most prolific racers probably would have it covered with 2 or 3 wheel rate options.

I've been aware of Mitch's car for quite some time now, and as far as I know he's had the same 1.24" torsion bars for well over a decade now and he participates in a lot of events.

As far as geometry optimization, I really don't think there's an issue with the torsion bar suspension. Honestly, I think this thread shows pretty well that out of the box the coil over conversions aren't overall better for geometry than the torsion bar suspension is. Sure, there are differences, but really neither one is dramatically better than the other, both have pros and cons. And there are now just as many ways to optimize the torsion bars set up as there are ways to optimize the coil over conversions. So if you're going to tune and optimize you can get into the same ballpark with either suspension. And keeping the torsion bar suspension definitely has advantages when it comes to chassis loading, namely, its in a chassis that was designed for its loading points.